Surviving and Thriving in a Hectic World

Recommendations

This recommendations page lists all of the products that I’ve used that have been extremely valuable to me in achieving balance in my life. This way you can explore as well and find great products all in one place.

Please note that there are affiliate links below, and I may receive commissions for purchases made through these links.This occurs without any extra cost to you. I only refer products that I personally have found to be amazingly valuable, and thus I hope you will too. Thanks for your support.

Brilliant Meal Recommendations

This is the book that originally got me on the family dinner track for reclaiming our dinner hour. It’s such an amazing read, full of ideas on how to jump-start your family dinner process, great recipes, advice on turning leftovers into new dinners, how to get the conversation going in new directions, how to make it special, and just an incredibly rich and beautiful book. If you are looking for a wealth of additional ideas and ways to get this great tradition started in your family, take a look – it will absolutely inspire you to totally transform your dinners. Read Your Magic Formula For a Great Life: Family Dinner about the ways you can reclaim your own family dinnertime.

For a great place to start your healthy breakfast transformation, with more than 30 amazingly delicious smoothie recipes, this is a beautiful book. It’s what keeps my smoothie variety (and thus healthy breakfast habit) going, with enough recipes to get you through more than 3 weeks of different smoothie breakfasts! It has a truly marvelous variety of smoothie recipes (eg kiwi mango, pink melon, peach detox are among my favorites), so that you can easily establish a smoothie habit to keep your mornings sane and delicious. Read Your Single Best Tactic to Supercharge your Day for how to get started with healthy breakfast smoothies.

Brilliant Productivity and Leadership Recommendations

The gallup “Strengths Finder” book and assessment is the one that started the strengths-based leadership movement. It’s the definitive book and accompanying online questionnaire that shows you your top strengths, hundreds of strategies for applying your strengths, and will change the way you look at yourself, and get you on the road to leveraging your strengths to the max. It is a reference that I find myself going back to again and again as I encounter new challenges and new personalities to work with.

Quick and decisive decision-making is a top trait for effective leadership. But listening to our intuition to enable quick decision-making doesn’t always come naturally. In Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, Malcolm Gladwell provides evidence and approaches for tapping into our intuition – I found it incredibly helpful in getting myself to trust my gut instincts for decision-making. Read 5 Ways To Amp Up Your Decision-Making Instincts for additional tips.

Your calendar = your priorities. Making sure your priorities are actually on your calendar ensures you carve out time for them in your day-to-day, otherwise it’s 100% likely that somebody or something else is going to fill that time. I find it much more enjoyable to plan my calendar if it also looks beautiful — to keep you inspired towards your goals and priorities, check out this Inspirational Planner Bundle from Michelle at Elegance and Enchantment — she’s a graphic designer with an awesome bundle of beautiful calendar printables, motivational phone/tablet/desktop wallpapers, cleaning and goal planners. These will be sure to get you on the path to brilliant prioritization!

The fast pace of life means that we are constantly in need of making choices, decisions, and setting direction both at home and at work. Especially for those of us that tend to overthink things, some decisions feel too big to make without endless analysis, research, and thinking about potential outcomes. In many cases for me this ends up simply as never really fully committing to an option. This is where 10-10-10 comes into play. 10-10-10 is a way to make your decisions with confidence, get unstuck, and move yourself forward with clarity. The details and a plethora of examples about it can be found in Suzy Welch’s book on the subject.

Increasing your confidence and credibility positively correlates to your success, and can open the door to new opportunities. Confidence and credibility are traits important in every aspect of our lives — they help us deal with pressure and meet personal or professional challenges head on and with success. So how do you begin to build your confidence and credibility? What behaviors will build these key skills? Cara Hale Alter’s book “The Credibility Code” is filled with advice, examples, and exercises of how to build and boost your confidence and credibility, with Cara’s own injection of the humour and realities of building confidence in today’s world — I highly recommend it.